I remember in school the local Archbishop once came and taught a class and he said one of the hardest parts of translating the Bible into modern languages is we've lost the meaning of so many colloquialisms that made perfect sense to those who used them 2,000-plus years ago, but which if taken literally mean nothing to us today, leaving translators having to both guess at the meaning and come up with a latter-day equivalent. Since language is nothing less than translating thought into word, there's always going to be an impurity to the exercise of communication, but taking a thought in one language and putting it into another....it's a wonder anything ever comes across as clearly as it does.

Good thing anime usually gets its point across in facial expressions...

If I have to tell you how much that stretched my limited French, well......

My high school friends who took French (I took Afrikaans) always used to amuse themselves by giving me the rudest things to say in French and then stood back as I took verbal abuse from their French teacher.

I just remembered one of the things I was told to say: "Baise moi!" - I thought it was a compliment to the very pretty French teacher until she started yelling at me.

That and I'm glad she didn't hit me: the French teacher was a feisty lady indeed. I remember spluttering apologies after I was told what that phrase meant - my face was so red you could have lit cigarettes off of it.

Years ago, I knew of someone who had the theory that if you knew how to say, 'I have a big snake in my pants' in any language, that was all you needed. He asked a Chinese girl to teach him how to say this in Cantonese, and she refused, saying that the translation was incredibly, incredibly crude.

Legolas = Kagolaxis. Sounds like a medication for when you have difficulty going to the toilet.

I was given an 'unauthorized' copy of the Donnie Yen movie Ip Man. Not since the 80's have I seen such weird translations of Cantonese into English. They constantly translated names into their literal meaning, so 'Wing Chun' was referred to as 'Eternal Spring' or 'Everlasting Spring'.

Also, there were weird literal translations of Cantonese, complete with Cantonese syntax. For example, in Cantonese the word for 'challenge match' with reference to a martial arts school is 'tek kwoon', which literally translates to 'kick house of training' or 'kick temple'.

The Cantonese idiom for 'is it or is it not' or 'will you or won't you' is 'hai m-hai', which is a modifier that literally translates as 'yes / not yes'.

So, the subtitles were full of loopy sentences like, 'teacher, he is here to kick temple! You kick temple yes not yes?' 'I am Ip Man Everlasting Spring Time!'

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